A 'Nobel' choice for the Peace Prize

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published 8:00 pm, Friday, October 12, 2007

Al Gore
won half of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as the messenger -- in speeches, lectures, books and film -- who is alerting the world that climate change is happening. But the
Nobel committee
also chose to honor the people who slowly and laboriously have come up with a consensus of what global warming is -- the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"I'm very happy,"
Roger Smith
, executive director of the Connecticut office of Clean Water Action, said Friday. "It really is an acknowledgement that this is the great social issue of our time."
Smith and Dan Esty

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, director of the Yale University Center for Environmental Law and Policy, said Friday that Gore really does deserve credit for his work to wake the world up to climate change.
"He's done the best job I've seen at explaining the science," Smith said.
Esty said as a result of Gore's work there has been a huge growth in awareness about climate change over the past two years, along with an equal commitment to seeing things change.
"We're seeing a willingness to shift to radically different sources of energy," he said.
Part of this stems from dissatisfaction with our dependence on oil from the Middle East, Esty said. Part of it is recognizing the pollution that burning petroleum products creates. And there's also the realization that environmental issues aren't just about aesthetics but are critically intertwined with "the fundamental issues of life."
And those issues -- whether measured in rising seas or shrinking rivers -- are everywhere.
"If you've got one state that has water and one that needs it, you've got an issue," Smith said.
While Gore has been the effective public speaker on behalf of global warming, there are thousands of scientists working on the issue around the world. The

U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
-- co-winner of the Nobel Prize with Gore -- does the grunt work of gathering together all the research being done and issuing a series of reports every six or seven years to tell the world how and why the climate is changing.
Peter Frumhoff
, director of science for the
Union of Concerned Scientists
in Cambridge, Mass., is part of that effort, serving as one of the lead authors on one of four IPCC reports this year -- the last will be out next month.
Frumhoff said about 2,500 scientists are involved with the IPCC this year. Their work is voluntary, and the reports are written only after weeks of wrangling between researchers and government leaders.
As a result, he said, all the reports are "very sober,'' reflecting consensus rather than radical thought. Because of that, the IPCC reports carry weight. It's easy to argue with one or two scientists but not 2,500.
Frumhoff was clearly elated Friday by the news of the Nobel Peace Prize. He will not see a penny of the $1.5 million that comes with it, but he does not care.
"For us, it's a labor of love," Frumfoff said.